About
80
Publications
22,856
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
2,455
Citations
Introduction
Publications
Publications (80)
Context. Pomatomus saltatrix is one of few globally distributed pelagic mesopredators that is exploited heavily throughout its range. Despite the implementation of management strategies, the southwestern Pacific Ocean (eastern Australian) population has few published estimates of the key life-history parameters including growth. Aims. To estimate t...
The capacity of ectotherms to adjust their thermal tolerance limits through evolution or acclimation seems relatively modest and highly variable, and we lack satisfying explanations for both findings given a limited understanding of what ultimately determines an organism's thermal tolerance. Here, we test if the amount of heating an ectotherm toler...
Many marine species are shifting their distributions in response to changing ocean conditions, posing significant challenges and risks for fisheries management. Species distribution models (SDMs) are used to project future species distributions in the face of a changing climate. Information to fit SDMs generally comes from two main sources: fishery...
Projecting the future distributions of commercially and ecologically important species has become a critical approach for ecosystem managers to strategically anticipate change, but large uncertainties in projections limit climate adaptation planning. Although distribution projections are primarily used to understand the scope of potential change ‐...
Context Zooplanktivorous fish are a key link between abundant zooplankton and higher trophic levels but the foraging behaviour of zooplanktivorous fish is not fully understood. Selective feeding behaviours have been observed, with many species of planktivorous fish targeting certain species and sizes of zooplankton for prey. However, why certain si...
A useful measure of general climate stress is where and when novel habitats emerge. Here we evaluate ‘climate envelope novelty’–a spatial indicator of system-level habitat change–in the California Current System (CCS), by quantifying the emergence of novel ocean conditions in multivariate physical-biogeochemical space. We use downscaled climate pro...
More than half of the fish biomass of coastal rocky reefs depends on zooplankton; however, the trophic basis of estuarine fish assemblages remains unknown. We quantified the trophic basis (i.e. basal energy sources) of fish community biomass inhabiting three habitat types (seagrass, natural reef and artificial reef) in two estuaries, compared with...
Plankton is an important component of the food web in coastal reef ecosystems. Ocean currents subsidise local production by supplying plankton to resident and reef-associated planktivorous fishes. Measuring the fine-scale distribution of these schooling fishes provides insight into their habitat use and how they balance risk and reward while foragi...
Consumption is the primary trophic interaction in ecosystems and its accurate estimation is required for reliable ecosystem modeling. When estimating consumption, species’ diets are commonly assumed to be the average of those that occur among habitats, seasons, and life stages which introduces uncertainty and error into consumption rate estimates....
One of the significant challenges to using information and ideas generated through ecosystem models and analyses for ecosystem-based fisheries management is the disconnect between modeling and management needs. Here we present a case study from the U.S. West Coast, the stakeholder review of NOAA’s annual ecosystem status report for the California C...
Management strategy evaluation (MSE) is a simulation approach that serves as a “light on the hill” (Smith, 1994) to test options for marine management, monitoring, and assessment against simulated ecosystem and fishery dynamics, including uncertainty in ecological and fishery processes and observations. MSE has become a key method to evaluate trade...
More than half of the fish biomass of coastal rocky reefs depends on zooplankton; however, the trophic basis of estuarine fish assemblages remains unknown. We quantified the trophic basis (i.e. basal energy sources) of fish community biomass inhabiting three habitat types (seagrass, natural reef and artificial reef) in two estuaries, and at two coa...
Stock enhancement is a contemporary management method employed to support fisheries productivity. Blue swimmer crab (Portunus armatus) is a widely distributed species that has been identified as a candidate for stock enhancement; however, the release strategy and ecological impact of releases have not yet been assessed. Here, we (1) quantify the bi...
Multispecies schools of small planktivorous fishes are important constituents of reefs and coastal infrastructure; however, determining the extent and distribution of these schools is challenging. Here, we describe a novel use of a low‐cost portable multibeam echosounder from a small vessel, which can concurrently measure detailed bathymetry and th...
Across the world’s oceans, western boundary currents are strengthening and warming faster than the global average. This is expected to have large impacts on the distribution of pelagic fishes, as their dispersal and physiological range limits shift. Monitoring the distribution of larval fish assemblages, sampled with plankton nets, allows for popul...
Accurate forecasts of how animals respond to climate‐driven environmental change are needed to prepare for future redistributions, however, it is unclear which temporal scales of environmental variability give rise to predictability of species distributions. We examined the temporal scales of environmental variability that best predicted spatial ab...
Extrapolating patterns from individuals to populations informs climate vulnerability models, yet biological responses to warming are uncertain at both levels. Here we contrast data on the heating tolerances of fishes from laboratory experiments with abundance patterns of wild populations. We find that heating tolerances in terms of individual physi...
Time-area closures are a valuable tool for mitigating fisheries bycatch. There is increasing recognition that dynamic closures, which have boundaries that vary across space and time, can be more effective than static closures at protecting mobile species in dynamic environments. We created a management strategy evaluation to compare static and dyna...
Many fish species are shifting spatial distributions in response to climate change, but projecting these shifts and measuring their impact at fine scales are challenging. We present a simulation that projects change in fishery landings due to spatial distribution shifts, by combining regional ocean and biogeochemical models (forced by three earth s...
Spatial distributions of marine fauna are determined by complex interactions between environmental conditions and animal behaviors. As climate change leads to warmer, more acidic, and less oxygenated oceans, species are shifting away from their historical distribution ranges, and these trends are expected to continue into the future. Correlative Sp...
Some dramatic consequences of climate change are caused by shifting species interactions and associated changes to trophic structure and energy flow. In coastal ecosystems, the relative abundance of feeding guilds indicates dominant energy sources sustaining food webs. Here, we use a space‐for‐time substitution to investigate potential climate chan...
Transport of larvae by ocean currents is an important dispersal mechanism for many species. The timing and location of spawning can have a large influence on settlement location. Shifts in the known spawning habitat of fish, whether due to climate or the discovery of new spawning stock, can influence the distribution of juveniles and our understand...
Time‐area closures are an important tool for reducing fisheries bycatch, but their effectiveness and economic impact can be influenced by the changes in species distributions. For fisheries targeting highly mobile species, the economic impact of a closure may by highly dynamic, depending on the current suitability of the closed area for the target...
Recent environmental flow management in the Murray‐Darling Basin, south‐eastern Australia, has centered on restoring natural flooding regimes to meet ecological requirements, including the promotion of native fish recruitment, despite uncertainty about the effectiveness of managed environmental flooding. This study investigated recruitment response...
The range expansion of tropical fish into temperate waters is increasing markedly in response to climate change. Range-expanding fish encounter novel diets and environments, but we know little about how these conditions facilitate or hinder distribution shifts. Here, we quantified relative growth rate, morphometric condition and trophic niche of ju...
Forage fish are a vital trophic group in marine ecosystems and numerical models, linking plankton with higher trophic levels. The bioenergetics of a key forage fish in eastern Australia, yellowtail scad Trachurus novaezelandiae, was measured using static respirometry and bomb calorimetry to assess their trophic contribution as both predator and pre...
Pomatomus saltatrix is an important recreational fishing species with seven major populations worldwide. The reproductive biology of the southwest Pacific Ocean (east Australian) population is uncertain, with both an extended spawning and multiple spawning periods previously hypothesised. Here we demonstrate an altered sex ratio biased towards fema...
Larval fishes are a useful metric of marine ecosystem state and change, as well as species-specific patterns in phenology. The high level of taxonomic expertise required to identify larval fishes to species level, and the considerable effort required to collect samples, make these data very valuable. Here we collate 3178 samples of larval fish asse...
Artificial structures are agents of change in marine ecosystems. They add novel habitat for hard-substrate organisms and modify the surrounding environment. Most research to date has focused on the communities living directly on artificial structures, and more research is needed on the potential impacts these structures have on nearby communities a...
Consumption rates are the foundation of trophic ecology, yet bioenergetics models used to estimate these rates can lack realism by not incorporating the ontogeny of diet. We constructed a bioenergetics model of a marine predatory fish (tailor, Pomatomus saltatrix) that incorporated high-resolution ontogenetic diet variation, and compared consumptio...
Estuaries provide important nursery habitats for juvenile fish, but many species move between estuarine and coastal habitats throughout their life. We used otolith chemistry to evaluate the use of estuaries and the coastal marine environment by juvenile Pomatomus saltatrix in eastern Australia. Otolith chemical signatures of juveniles from 12 estua...
The redistribution of species has emerged as one of the most pervasive impacts of anthropogenic climate warming, and presents many societal challenges. Understanding how temperature regulates species distributions is particularly important for mobile marine fauna such as sharks given their seemingly rapid responses to warming, and the socio-politic...
Stocking is increasingly used as a tool for fishery enhancement in estuarine environments. Stocking densities are often estimated by modelling resource availability, but this can be difficult for lower trophic level species, such as crustaceans, which can consume a wide variety of difficult-to-sample food resources. We present a stocking model that...
Microplastics and fibres occur in high concentrations along urban coastlines, but the occurrence of microplastic ingestion by fishes in these areas requires further investigation. Herein, the ingestion of debris (i.e., synthetic and natural fibres and synthetic fragments of various polymer types) by three benthic-foraging fish species Acanthopagrus...
A goal of designed artificial reefs (ARs) is to enhance fish abundance, species diversity and fishing opportunities by providing food and refuge for fish. Quantifying the contribution of ARs to coastal ecosystems and fisheries productivity requires an understanding of fish presence at the structure and connectivity with surrounding habitats. In the...
Zooplankton are the intermediate trophic level between phytoplankton and fish, and are an important component of carbon and nutrient cycles, accounting for a large proportion of the energy transfer to pelagic fishes and the deep ocean. Given zooplankton's importance, models need to adequately represent zooplankton dynamics. A major obstacle, though...
Pelagic mesopredators are abundant in many marine ecosystems and exert strong top-down influence on food webs. We explored the dietary niche of Pomatomus saltatrix in eastern Australia, using a classification tree analysis to identify key factors driving diet variation. P. saltatrix was shown to be an opportunistic generalist predator which exhibit...
Coastal temperate rocky reefs are economically valuable and highly diverse, yet the trophodynamics of these productive systems are understudied. Quantifying the trophic linkages that support fish assemblages on these reefs is valuable for understanding how these assemblages may change due to changes in benthic and pelagic primary production. The go...
Designed artificial reefs (ARs) are deployed for various purposes including the enhancement of recreational fisheries. The ability to assess recreational harvest is important for determining the effectiveness of AR deployments. Harvest estimation at AR fisheries pose many logistical and budgetary challenges. We present a pragmatic approach to estim...
Patterns in larval transport of coastal species have important implications for species connectivity, conservation, and fisheries, especially in the vicinity of a strengthening boundary current. An Ocean General Circulation Model for the Earth Simulator particle tracking model was used to assess the potential dispersal of Eastern King Prawn (EKP) l...
Ectotherms from higher latitudes can generally perform over broader temperature ranges than tropical ectotherms. This pattern is thought to reflect trends in temperature variability: tropical ectotherms evolve to be ‘thermal specialists’ because their environment is thermally stable. However, the tropics are also hotter, and most physiological rate...
Artificial reefs are a widely used tool aimed at fishery enhancement, and measuring the scale at which fish assemblages associate with these artificial habitat patches can aid reef design and spatial arrangement. The present study used rapidly deployed underwater video (drop cameras) to determine the magnitude and spatial scale of associations betw...
The influence of temperate rocky reef habitat factors on associated fish assemblages is poorly understood. In particular, the effect of depth on fish abundance and species composition is understudied in coastal environments (and the transition zone of macroalgae to non-macroalgae reefs) due to limitations of traditional visual survey methods. This...
Artificial reefs provide shelter and can be an important source of food for fish depending on the epibenthic community on the structure. The growth and diversity of this community is influenced by the substratum material and the surface orientation of the reef. Settlement plates of four materials (Perspex, sandstone, wood and steel) were deployed i...
It was recently demonstrated that oil platforms are among the most productive marine fish habitats (Claisse et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 111:15462–15467, 2014). Designed artificial reef systems are similar, albeit smaller, modified habitats designed to accommodate fish assemblages. We compared fish production at a large designed reef to reporte...
Many species of fish move between ocean and estuarine habitats; however, there is little evidence of the magnitude of fish undertaking these movements particularly over short time scales. Such information is critical in understanding the connectivity between these major habitats. We used an acoustic camera to observe the entire entrance of a small...
1. Temperature strongly regulates the distribution and fitness of ectotherms, and many studies have measured the temperature-dependence of physiological performance in controlled laboratory settings. In contrast, little is known about how temperature influences ectotherm performance in the wild, so the ecological significance of physiological perfo...
Identifying nursery habitats for an aquatic species generally requires tracing adult individuals back through time and space to the area or habitat in which they developed as juveniles. We develop and trial a study design and analytical approach to evaluate the suitability of using stable isotopes to trace emigrating prawns to putative nursery site...
Consumption is the basis of metabolic and trophic ecology and is used to assess an animal's trophic impact. The contribution of activity to an animal's energy budget is an important parameter when estimating consumption, yet activity is usually measured in captive animals. Developments in telemetry have allowed the energetic costs of activity to be...
Artificial reefs continue to be deployed in coastal areas to enhance local fisheries. An important factor influencing the success of artificial reefs may be the provision of refuge for zooplanktivorous fishes, which use artificial reefs as a base to forage the surrounding zooplankton. A numerical model was developed to quantify this trophic pathway...
Figure S1 Evaluation of the impact of attraction for reef fish, with maximum CPUE occuring at 70% of the maximum fish density before artficial reef deployment.
Figure S2 Evaluation of the impact of attraction for reef‐associated pelagic fish, with maximum CPUE occuring at 70% of the maximum fish density before artficial reef deployment.
Defining the oceanic habitats of migratory marine species is important for both single species and ecosystem-based fisheries management, particularly when the distribution of these habitats vary temporally. This can be achieved using species distribution models that include physical environmental predictors. In the present study, species distributi...
The debate on whether artificial reefs produce new fish or simply attract existing fish biomass continues due to the difficulty in distinguishing these processes, and there remains considerable doubt as to whether artificial reefs are a harmful form of habitat modification. The harm typically associated with attraction is that fish will be easier t...
The small salp, Thalia democratica, is known globally to form dense swarms, yet the physiological and oceanographic factors that influence the magnitude and
occurrence of these swarms are poorly understood. In this study, two numerical models were used to explore T. democratica population dynamics. A Lefkovitch matrix model identified that the surv...
Artificial reefs are a popular fisheries management tool, but the effect of these reefs on the abundance of fish in the surrounding pelagic environment is uncertain. Pelagic baited remote underwater video (PBRUV) was used to observe the fish assemblage surrounding an offshore artificial reef (OAR), near Sydney, Australia. PBRUVs were deployed at th...
Theoretical and laboratory studies generally show ectotherm performance increases with temperature to an optimum, and subsequently declines. Several physiological mechanisms likely shape thermal performance curves, but responses of free-ranging animals to temperature variation will represent a compromise between these mechanisms and ecological cons...
Length-based selection curves define the relative catchability of fish to specific types of fishing gear, with catchability often highest at intermediate fish lengths. Distributions such as the normal, lognormal, or gamma are often used to define “peaked” selection curves, but these have limited capabilities to describe strongly asymmetric selectio...
